


Elsewhere in a Quiet Place

by willowbilly



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Gore, Codependency, Father-Daughter Relationship, Female Character of Color, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Bigotry, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Kid Fic, M/M, Murder Family, POV Original Character, POV Outsider, Parent Will Graham, Season/Series 01, Trans Female Character, Underage Drinking, Will Graham Has Encephalitis, Will Graham Has a Daughter, all of which is very vague and/or brief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-22 00:36:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13752537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: There's something wrong with Lynne's dad.





	Elsewhere in a Quiet Place

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Salvia_G](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Salvia_G/gifts).



There's something wrong with Lynne's dad.

 

~~~

 

“Life is like one of those fairy tales,” Will says. “Except one of the old ones without the happy endings. One of those dark, gruesome ones where evil just screws with you for no reason and you have to claw your way out through wits and grit and desperation or end up hacked up and baked into a pie.”

“By a witch?” asks Lynne.

“Or by the friendly woodcutter,” says Will. “It's not always what you expect.”

“You said in the old ones that the stepmothers were nice, usually. And that the princesses saved themselves.”

He pauses, considering. Conceding. “Yeah. We got guys like the Brothers Grimm to blame for the revised versions. Because women were the storytellers, passing down their fables for generations through word of mouth, and then these men came along and decided to write all of these stories down, except they changed shit to suit their sexism. Their notions of women being only good and pure and helpless, or ambitious and twisted and greedy. And of a man always having to come along and ultimately save the day. When really, women are people, and people are both. Good and evil, mingled together.”

“Can we get one of the books where the fairy tale is written the right way?”

“I don't think they have many of those,” he says. Always the cynic. “Probably wouldn't sell them. Hey, but. But we'll look, okay?”

“I'll just write one myself,” says Lynne. “If we can't find it.”

 

~~~

 

Will wakes her up with nightmares every now and then, and she thinks that even when he stays quiet through the night, he doesn't sleep well. There are always shadows under his eyes and perspiration soaked through his shirt in the mornings. Sometimes they barely talk to each other, but if she asks a question he always answers her, no matter how flat and soft his voice, or how dead his expression, and he invariably answers in depth and detail and with great care.

While he's away at work he's Graham, not Will. Not Dad. Graham looks at bodies in photographs. Cut up bodies, bloody bodies, mottled purple bodies, rotting bodies with gray flesh sloughing off the bone and wet brown leaves plastered over waxy skin and spilled viscera. He looks at the photographs and arranges them in certain orders on slides, and adds other photos of muddy rivers or shallow ditches or empty houses splattered bright red and all bleached stark with the harsh white flash of the crime scene camera, and then he plays the slideshows for grown-ups in grown up classrooms at the FBI, and he talks about what happened to make the people in the photographs dead. About _who_ happened.

Lynne is not supposed to know any of this. She found out on her own. Rummages through his stuff on the regular, because she's long ago discovered where he hides the key which locks his file cabinet and succumbed to the curiosity which she can only partially convince herself is concern.

But as long as her dad doesn't know that she knows, it'll be okay. And he won't be sad or angry and he won't stop answering her whenever she asks him questions, even if sometimes he answers her with what she knows are lies. The same way that she has to lie to _him_ sometimes, like about flipping through the folders in his file cabinet, so that they can both be happy.

 

~~~

 

He calls her to tell her that he'll be late, that he's flying out to consult on an ongoing investigation. This is out of the ordinary, but Lynne taking care of herself isn't.

She feeds the dogs and heats up a can of cream of broccoli soup in a pot on the electric stovetop, standing on a short stool so she can see it from above and attentively stirring it all the while so that the house doesn't burn down. She does her homework as she eats it with bread and butter, neatly setting her place at their tiny round table with a napkin and a spoon and a bowl and a glass of water with a couple cubes of ice from the ice trays fetched from the freezer clinking in it, and when she's finished both her food and her homework she packs her books back into her backpack and washes the used dishes in the kitchen sink, again climbing up onto her stool to do so. The sky goes dark out the windows and she gets distracted watching it for a while, the hot water running in a soothing, steady beat over the insides of her wrists, down her hands, until her fingerprints stand out soft and shriveled and even the steam is scalding.

Then she sits in front of the television, letting the dogs pile up onto the couch with her just so that she can feel their weight, their warmth and their breathing. And she watches the news until she dozes off.

The headlights of Will's car in the driveway send grotesque shadows fleeing across the ceiling and start the dogs barking, jolting her awake. The news anchor is talking about another teenage girl found dead, tucked back into her bed at her childhood home. A white girl, wind-chafed, long, dark auburn hair that only shows its red in the sunlight. She fits the profile and was found in the same state where Lynne's dad just was. In the picture they show, she is smiling. Caught and preserved in a treasured moment of joy.

Lynne switches off the TV before Will trudges in, shoes scraping low over the steps and screen door slapping.

He looks terrible, and tired, but he also smiles when he sees her. Smiles wider when she leans over the back of the couch to raise her hands and make a frame around him with her fingers and thumb, closing one of her eyes to bring him into center focus.

“What're you doing?” he asks.

“Taking a picture with my heart,” she says in all seriousness, and he actually laughs, a dry chuckle rattling in his chest and his chin ducking down.

“I gotta go back and pick up another stray. Couldn't entice him into the car without any treats. You wanna come?”

“I'll get the hot dogs,” she says.

She was supposed to be in bed herself, hours ago, and if Will were a more stern, more typical father he would probably make her go there, would scold her and ask her what she's been doing and interrogate her about how she feels and what she thinks every damn day. He wouldn't swear in front of her. He would worry more, but he would be less afraid.

She wouldn't recognize him, but she'd love him anyway. There has to be at least one person who does, or there wouldn't be anybody. And he's far too lonely even with Lynne there for him. With her looking out for him the way he does for her, the two of them with their abnormal, codependent equality.

They go together for a drive in the middle of the night to coax a dog into coming back with them, and they wash him in a tub on the porch with the no-tears baby shampoo until he stops twitching away from their hands and the grime slides from his mottled tawny fur and he keeps licking the rivulets of lukewarm freshwater from his muzzle and blinking it out of his soft brown eyes as they pour it over him, going calm and quiet.

Will names him Winston.

 

~~~

 

He has to leave overnight for Minnesota, this time for a murdered girl mounted on antlers and left in the middle of a field. When he comes home later than expected all airwaves are blaring updates about Garret Jacob Hobbs and Will's hands are still shaking, the index finger of his right convulsing every now and then as if still compulsively curling around the trigger of a gun.

There are fine speckles of dried blood he must have missed while wiping his face clean, hiding in the stubbled shadow at the corner of his jaw. Lynne smells the copper tang of it when he falls to his knees and pulls her into a crushing hug, mingled with the clinging bouquet of sour fear sweat and the synthetic neutrality of commercial airline and rental car cushions, but she doesn't tell him. Instead she pats his back and lets herself go blank and empty as a glass jar of sunlight, and waits until the emptiness spreads into Will enough for him to stop trembling, for him to let her go. For him to breathe.

It's as bad as she's ever seen him, like when the insomnia hits him for weeks on end and he's looking off at his imagined things.

No. No, it's worse. It might be permanent, this time. The something wrong. The wrongness has finally gained a clawhold in a crack and now it's ripping him wide and burrowing in deep and he's just going to get dragged back out there again, back to the monsters' dens, where they can eat him from the outside in and the inside out until there's nothing left but bones between.

When their fragile peace wavers and Will starts to cry, it's only because Lynne has succumbed to the tears first and drags him into them with her. He pulls her in again and she clutches him close, choking in the smeared remnants of a serial killer's lifeblood with every sob.

“You're fine,” he keeps saying. Trying to reassure himself as much as he is Lynne. “You're fine, you're fine. I've got you.”

But she doesn't have him. With every second he's already slipping inexorably further away.

 

~~~

 

Hannibal Lecter arrives at their house one morning soon after.

“Hello there,” is what he says upon first seeing her. He'd blinked when she'd opened the door, and refocused downwards as if he'd been expecting someone taller. Expecting her dad. “And who might you be?”

“I'm Will Graham's _daughter,”_ she announces, loudly enough to be rude. But she hates it when people think they aren't related, that they can't be _family_ just because of her warm brown skin and her fluffy afro, and hates when people decide she's a boy even though she usually wears pretty skirts and dresses which she picks out herself and she's called _Lynne,_ now, instead of the deadname she was given when she was born.

“Ah. Of course,” he says, betraying not the merest flicker of surprise. Not past the initial blink, at any rate. When he smiles the corners of his eyes crinkle merrily. “Would you prefer I simply addressed you as Miss Graham?”

“Dr. Lecter,” says Will from behind her, sounding groggy and displeased at the surprise visit and at the way that the dogs are crowding around the cracked-open door, sniffing towards the picnic containers and barking, and pushing Lynne a little closer towards the doctor every time they bump against the backs of her legs. Will hushes them with a sharp hiss, then addresses the doctor again without looking at him but with all the assurance of someone switching between two distinct languages. There is no possibility of misunderstanding when the content itself is so discrete in manner and meaning. “We weren't expecting you.”

“And I was not expecting a lovely young lady to answer your door.” It's laid on thick enough to border on creepy, if not for the general gentlemanly air of European foreignness which grants his flattery leeway. Or it's simply a him thing. Something about him transmutes creepiness into elegance, instead. Alchemy. A philosopher's stone for social graces.

“Lynne,” says Will, a sigh elongating the flat glide of the end and sending it skimming over his daughter's head, to the ear of their visitor whose head cocked at an attentive angle, all the better to catch it. “Her name's Lynne.”

“As beautiful a name as I would have expected,” says Dr. Lecter to Lynne.

He seems courteous and interested. She cannot sense an ulterior motive or a mocking undertone, just stainless steel manners honed to a fine edge and sheathed within the muffling velvet of his accent. He's around the same height as her father but he seems taller, his broad, square shoulders in the pressed lines of his daringly ugly suit looming lean and lethal and blocking out the light in the doorway.

“Not really,” says Lynne.

“Then I humbly beg to differ. It's a pleasure to meet you, Lynne.” His eyes do the crinkling again, creasing in ridges like crumpled fans of age-darkened parchment paper, ripped-out pages of antique Old Testaments. He has a very shiny gaze but the color of it is blurry, somehow. Reflective and murky as still and bittersweet waters on an overcast day. There would be no telling how deep they go unless one were to drown in them.

It's odd, this juxtaposition of dry and wet, like even the analogies around him refuse to crystallize into a cohesive, substantive whole. She squints at the crisp side part of his hair to distract herself and decides that it's a very lame style, befitting a very weird man. Maybe he's going bald on top as well as gray.

“It's nice to meet you, too, Dr. Lecter,” Lynne replies, in her most professional voice. When they shake hands his is warm and dry and large enough that it swallows hers almost completely. There's the faintest dusting of hair on the backs. Prominent knuckles and tendons, big blue veins. Gentle grip despite it all.

“Call me Hannibal,” he says, and goes for the vampire-gaining-ingress question. “May I come in?”

Lynne glances at her father's resigned face, his reluctant shrug. She moves aside, and the soles of Hannibal's polished dress shoes click in casual finality as he steps over the threshold.

 

~~~

 

Will sleepwalks. Lynne finds out when the cops escort him home, Winston at his side, his feet bare and dirty. When he collapses into the armchair he stretches his legs out and she can see the popped blisters on the soles, ragged pink patches. Sees the bloodless frostbite-white kissing the very tips of his toes before Winston licks at them and he jerks away, jerks awake, and pulls them beneath himself.

“Are you all right?” Lynne asks him.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, sweetheart, I'm. I'm fine.”

His lies are going so thin they might as well be transparent.

 

~~~

 

Will visits the girl in the hospital a lot. The daughter of the serial killer he shot. The daughter of the man who murdered her mom and slashed her throat and put her in a coma.

Generally speaking, the daughter of a shitty father. Utterly unlike Lynne's.

When he returns he's always somber. Like in reaching out to one child he's afraid to do the same with the other. Like since he's father to one he'll become poisoned by the fatherhood wrought upon the other, and unwittingly bring it back.

Lynne only goes with him once before Abigail wakes up. She's pallid, the freckles which spatter her cold skin like cream on milk, and her hair in contrast looks as dark as the spiderweb shadows in dying forests. Tubes and tubes, miles of plastic and bandages, tying her down. Holding her together. A Snow White as delicate and artificial as a porcelain doll. When the nurse comes in to tell them that visiting hours are over he pulls Abigail's eyelid up with his thumb to shine his penlight at her pupil. The inside of her face is a sudden shocking crescent of poison-apple pink peeled back and exposed from the bloodshot gelatin sphere of her eyeball, fringed with charcoal splinter lashes and skinned wet and clean away from the dull roll of a china blue iris.

Will rubs at his own eyes in response, the paired prayer leaves of his hands passing over his own exhausted face like it, too, will peel off, the whole of it threatening to shed from the skull like the velvet rind from rotten fruit, so he does not notice Lynne's breath catch and the way she turns away from the girl in the bed and the disgusting scene of violation and vulnerability, of aloneness, which she represents.

Hannibal does, though. He smiles down at Lynne, beneficent, and clasps her shoulder for a moment. His bracing fingers engulf the narrow shelf of tender meat and pliant bone the same way his handshake did her hand on the first day, and it's a disconcertingly familiar feeling, like the handshake left an imprint in the memory sense of her body, a hollow without anchor roaming around the conceptual edges. It sends a shiver up her spine, as if something massive and dangerous is looming behind her, but it's only Hannibal. Only some therapist guy her dad met at work and seemingly can't get rid of, to judge from how often he mentions him.

The hand on Lynne's shoulder snags Will's gaze when he finally looks up again, the first time that his attention has automatically gone anywhere other than towards Abigail. His brow furrows as he traces the shape of Hannibal's comforting grip, the line of his arm.

A preexisting sense of puzzled forbearance deepens in Will's expression. He avoids Hannibal's eyes with the ease of long practice as Hannibal's smile likewise deepens, and neither of them are watching Lynne watch them.

Abigail remains oblivious, trapped in her enchantment of medically induced slumber.

She wakes on a day not long after. Will and Hannibal keep visiting her, but Lynne doesn't come again.

 

~~~

 

Some kids from school flaunt the Tattle Crime article at her. They make a point of reading it aloud as best they can, projecting enough for the whole class to hear and sounding out the words they don't know.

Lynne's already seen the article, of course, but it bothers her that they have, too. That other people go digging through the lurid true crime stories online to sate a similar fascination to her own, albeit one which probably stems from very different reasons. They _must_ be different reasons.

“That's your dad, isn't it? This says he's insane and he shouldn't be in charge of a kid at all.”

“He'll probbly murder you in your sleep.”

“Fuck off,” Lynne tells them, even though the usage is technically against the swearing rules and within earshot of the teacher. She earns herself a trip to the principal's office and an early ride home. Once the situation is explained to him, Will, in turn, tells the principal and the teacher the same thing Lynne told the article kids, and stops to get them both soft-serve ice cream on the way home.

Lynne picks strawberry. They lick at their cones with the windows down to the dwindling autumn sun, chill in hand and chill in air.

 

~~~

 

Beverly is the fucking best.

The more Lynne's dad has to go away for work the more antsy he gets about leaving her alone, even though she's nine and a half now, plenty old enough to look after herself like she usually does. But he insists on having someone to watch her anyway.

Well, he doesn't so much insist as he does sigh, his expression crumpled with preoccupation, and Lynne caves without a word.

For a few days Will hires bored teenagers to babysit, and once convinces Alana Bloom to do so. Alana is pleasant, and competent, and tries too hard not to be interested in anything at all of Will's, Lynne included. She makes casserole so there will be leftovers for later and she reminds Lynne to brush her teeth, and because neither of them quite know how to approach talking to one another, or need to live together and learn how to do so the way that Lynne and Will have, Lynne spends most of that time reading in her room and doesn't much care when it's the teens' turn again. Alana leaves fewer ripples than a pebble thrown in a puddle. A surgical incision so thin that there is no bleeding.

Beverly Katz is the exact opposite, crashing into the Graham routine and taking it over with all the panache of a really chill angel in a maroon leather jacket toting a six pack.

“The hell is that?” Will asks, and Beverly hefts the pack, cans clattering and twisting in their web of plastic.

“No worries, dude, it's soft drinks. Zero alcohol content. Whaddaya take me for, some scumbag corrupter of the youth?”

“Just please,” says Will, apologetic and harried as he searches for one of his shoes and finds it being chewed upon by one of the many dogs jockeying to be directly underfoot. “Be a responsible adult for me, here.”

Beverly cackles. “I've never been responsible in my _life._ But, sure, whatever floats your boat. No,” and she interrupts herself with a glint of levity, a softer smile of compassion dampening her glee, “seriously, man, you know how many siblings I was stuck with. I _got_ this. Won't let a thing happen to the precious little squirt.”

Will pauses on his way out the door with his briefcase in hand. Lingering for too long, going too still. “I'm trusting you,” he says.

Beverly lets him have his moment, meeting his gaze and nodding her head, and then with far less gravitas she breaks into another grin, throws him a thumbs-up, and bodily hip-checks him clear out the door.

“Whew,” she says, slamming it behind him with a kick of her heel. “Finally got rid of him, huh? Time to get _turnt.”_

“On soda,” Lynne deadpans, her judgmental sarcasm warring with her caution and ultimately winning out. She's met Beverly before, but only briefly. Only when Will was around.

“Hey, now, I meant what I said. This is a strict prohibition zone all up in here.”

“Okay,” says Lynne.

“You want some non-booze, kid?”

“Okay,” Lynne repeats amiably.

Beverly wrenches a can free and passes it to Lynne as she heads off to the living room, shrugging off her jacket and throwing herself onto the couch. Lynne trails in behind her.

“So do you get out much or are you a shut-in like your dad? Prefer your solitude?” Beverly wrangles out another can and pops the tab, a rush of foam spurting down the side. “Shit,” she says, frantically digging in the pocket of her discarded jacket and extracting a balled-up fast food napkin, mopping at the mess before it drips to the couch.

Lynne perches on the armchair diagonally across from her and leaves her soda unopened. “Not really. I was invited to a sleepover once, by someone from school, but her mom found out it was me and didn't let me come.”

“What a bitch,” says Beverly, sympathetically. “Oh wait. Shit, am I allowed to curse in front of you? _Shit._ I mean oh fu— I mean _darn.”_

“My dad does all the time,” says Lynne. “He says most swearwords are utilitarian. They only have power if you imbue them with it, or if you use them as weapons against other people. But just saying them is all right so long as it's not a slur.”

“Gotcha. But if it's all the same to you, I gotta get a handle on my language. Practice my self-control, you know?”

“Like for a mental exercise.”

Beverly laughs, a touch disbelievingly. “Holy shiitake mushrooms, kiddo.”

Lynne tightens her hands around the can. Carefully loosens. “What?” she asks.

“Sorry, it's just. You don't _talk_ like a kid. More like a mini professor or something. I bet adults are always telling you they're so impressed by your maturity.”

“Sometimes,” says Lynne.

“And it's always a compliment, isn't it?” Beverly says. A wry twist tugs at the side of her mouth, and she leans back on the couch, hooking an ankle over her opposite knee. “Like it's for the best when a child doesn't have a childhood because it makes everything so much more easy and _convenient_ for the people who're supposed to take care of them, so much less effort. Like there's not something missing.”

Winston moseys over to Lynne and puts his head on her lap. He's turned out to be the sweetest and politest of the dogs, and the most sensitive to Lynne and Will's moods. Coming over to them when either of them are upset.

“Sometimes it's just that growing up faster is easier,” Lynne says.

“Not usually. Not unless there's something wrong.”

“There's nothing wrong with me.” She almost slips, almost emphasizes the last word, but she catches herself before then.

“Didn't say there was,” says Beverly. She takes a noisy sip of her soda. Smacks her lips. “Just that you're awful precocious for a baby... fourth? A baby fourth grader.”

“It's not my dad's fault, or anything,” says Lynne. Winston whines faintly until she shushes him and begins to rub his ears. “That I don't behave like a kid or whatever. He does his best. And I've only lived with him since my mom died, anyway.”

Beverly's dark, gracile eyes are too sharp, bright as a robin's on the hunt. “That happen recently?”

Three years ago. Seems less. “Recently enough.”

“Yep,” Beverly mutters, as if to herself. “That'd do it.”

Lynne doesn't ask what Beverly means because she thinks Beverly understands; that Beverly knows it's a matter of sorrow, of subtle trauma, and couldn't help but poke it with a stick to prod out the shape of it and see if it was something dangerous which still needed killing. She's overbearingly curious, sudden, blistering spikes of electric care crackling like lightning strikes on a clear day of blithe blue, but Lynne doesn't begrudge Beverly for it. Even finds it comforting, in a way. Just shrugs in vague agreement and keeps petting Winston with one hand and feeling the sweating soda can slowly warm in her other.

“Well,” says Beverly, loud and buoyant again. She slams back her soda and grins. Inconspicuously pats at her chest and then flicks the long, coal-black sheet of her hair over her shoulder as if to distract from the fact that she's obviously struggling not to belch. “Screw all that and screw the haters, because for now _we're_ gonna have a _rollicking_ good girl's night in.” Her last word squeaks on a hiccup, but otherwise she seems to have contained herself, if not her smugness at doing so.

“Not... too rollicking, right?” Lynne asks tentatively.

“We're gonna have a gosh darned _relaxing_ girl's night in,” Beverly amends smoothly, with no less enthusiasm. “If it ever gets to be too much you can tap out and skedaddle, by the way. You don't have to hang out if you don't want to.”

“I want to,” Lynne says. Something warm has lit in her chest at the prospect of a “girl's night.” Of having a friend to have a sleepover with, even if her new friend is a temporary guardian figure who's more like a cool big sister than a peer. Of having a friend, period.

It hasn't occurred to her before now that she might be as lonely as her dad.

“Awesome!” Beverly claps her hands and swings to her feet. “I was thinking pizza and a movie and the metric ton of junk food I stashed in my car. Painting our nails is optional but if that's up your alley I brought four different colors and _way_ too much glitter.”

“It takes awhile for delivery to arrive out here,” says Lynne.

Beverly points towards the kitchen. “Your dad told me he stocked up on a few frozen kosher pies for the occasion as per my instruction, good ole cheese and veggie. We can just pop one of those bad boys in to bake and we're all set. What's your favorite movie? Any requests?”

“I like _2001: A Space Odyssey.”_

Beverly blinks in surprise. “Huh. Not what I woulda expected but heck, sounds epic. You ready to rock and roll, kid?”

“Let's do this thing,” says Lynne.

 

~~~

 

Hannibal spends more and more time with her dad. His expensive car begins to cruise up their gravel driveway in the mornings to pick Will up, always arriving before the bus so that he can greet Lynne before she leaves for school. He strikes up friendly conversation with Lynne as if he respects her, as if he wants to hear her speak on important matters. He is unfailingly considerate and accommodating.

Her dad is less twitchy when Hannibal's around. He doesn't stare so much at things which aren't there. Not because he stops seeing them, probably, but because Hannibal bends Will's focus as gravity does light. He imparts a lens, a framework.

As far as Lynne is concerned this is a good thing. Even Beverly and Alana don't have so positive an effect on him, so she sees no reason not to allow Hannibal to insinuate himself into their life in all his sophisticated implacability.

But it _is_ “their life.” Will and Lynne together. This does not change no matter how busy and haunted her father has become, or however often he goes to see Abigail Hobbs. Between Lynne and Hannibal, only one of them is _intrinsic_ to Will Graham, to him as a person, as a functioning human... and it is not Hannibal.

The back of her neck starts to prickle whenever Hannibal stands behind her, but whenever she checks she finds that he is not even looking her way.

There is absolutely nothing the matter.

Hannibal is helping.

 

~~~

 

The case with the abducted boys who return to their families only to kill them hits Will hard. Harder than it perhaps would have if he hadn't been a father. Harder than if he'd only had Abigail, and not Lynne as well.

It almost breaks him at the most mundane of times: while putting Lynne's hair up in a single big puff atop her head after they've woken. She doesn't realize at first. He's standing behind her at the bathroom sink and she has her eyes closed as she lets his hands maneuver her this way and that in their homey ritual, feeling the firm, careful tugs at her roots, the warmth of his touch against her scalp. First the light scrape of the broad-toothed comb, then the loose ponytail to hold it in the general area where it should sit, and then the rhythmic upward sweep of the soft bristle brush around the circumference of the ponytail. All fine. It's when he begins flattening the brushed hair with the gel that she feels his unsteadiness, the way he cradles her cranium as he would a blown-out eggshell.

She opens her eyes and looks at him in the mirror, its clarity besmirched with flecks of toothpaste and mineral stains from the tap water.

He is watching something behind them, the reflection of it, and he is holding her head forward so that she will not turn and see it there, too, there in the decaying flesh. He is crumbling away as well. Along with all the invisible dead things which shamble in his footsteps and pour themselves into his ears at night.

“You'll die if you keep this up,” she says, in a detached monotone barely recognizable as her own.

His gaze flicks to hers, and she sees the bite marks the monsters have already left on his skeleton. They're eating their way out of him. Consuming him alive, subsuming the place in his face where Lynne dwells.

They do not look much alike, but there is a resemblance to be eked out somewhat in the shape of their ears, the angular prominence to the corners of their jaws, and in the crookedness of their mouths. His eyes are maybe more akin to Abigail Hobbs' than to Lynne's, though, his a pale, hazy color of mutable slate tinged with hazel whereas Lynne's are so deep and luminous a brown that the pupils are lost within radiant darkness.

Hers are her mother's eyes. They match the ones in the framed photograph she has on her nightstand, and those in the album tucked away in the bookcase. She wonders sometimes if she reminds Will of her; of Daphne Walters. The woman he happened to meet when they were both at their loneliest and desperately wishing to be less so. They'd fallen in and then out of love softly, a fleeting and melancholy comfort which grew and died like the dreamy gloaming hours, painless and resigned. Lynne's conception and birth and the subsequent custody shared between amicably separated parents unfolded in an atmosphere much the same.

She had spent so much time in the backs of cars as a result. Strapped snug into a high child seat and with her head lolled towards a window, watching the blur of time and space, the asphalt rolling gray and endless beneath the tires, lulled by the engine's thunderous white noise rumble. Traveling back and forth between mother and father.

For fun, she used to imagine that she was a person comprised of two different, incomplete pieces which would switch places during the drive from house to house. Half of her would slowly shrink to serve as foundation, would shrivel up and pack itself away in a safe little box during the drive, and the other half of her would unpack and expand until it filled her skin, glued under her nails and at the roots of her teeth so that there were no wrinkles. A change of clothes for special occasions. For specialized occasions.

When her mom lost herself in an endless, hopeless blank. When she killed herself. It was like the half of Lynne which existed for Daphne retreated into its box and then sealed itself in. No lock, no seams. Just a solid, impenetrable cube, an inanimate leftover taking up space in the chambers of her heart, an alien mass lodged angular and uncomfortable in the aching constriction of muscle.

If Will slips into self-destruction, too, there will not be enough glue sticks and pushpins in the whole world to keep the remnants of herself from crumpling.

“Lynne, I have— there aren't any other options I can choose, here,” Will says. “Not in... good conscience.”

“You can choose me,” says Lynne. Her chest is shuddering and her eyes burn and sting as she glares at him, but his hands are still horrendously kind against her skull, and she holds her head perfectly still beneath them. “Choose _me.”_

“I'm sorry,” he says.

Someone must have browbeaten him into this, roused this guilt and driven him into a corner. As if the only way Will Graham could possibly help anyone is through the sacrifice of himself. Throat opened like Abigail's on the altar of justice, the knife so thoughtfully provided for him.

“You won't do this forever, will you?” she asks. Grasping for the bleakest of reassurances.

“I won't,” he says.

“You _can't.”_

“I promise I won't,” he says. “One day I won't, okay? I _promise,_ Lynne.”

“I hate you,” she whispers.

He breathes in, deep and slow, and lets it back out. Scoops out a fresh glob of gel and applies it, picks up the brush, and then brushes the gel in with stiff, precise strokes starting from Lynne's hairline, placing his index and middle fingers beneath her chin to lift and turn her towards him as he does so. She closes her eyes again, and holds her breath like that will suffocate the white-hot rage surging up through her body. The sudden, loathing, _furious_ despair.

It's just like with her mom. Lynne is not good enough to prevent anything, to protect anyone. She is not enough.

 

~~~

 

Christmas morning dawns with Will gone, called out before she woke up. There's a modest last-minute tree wreathed with glowing lights and sparkly tinsel shedding needles onto the presents beneath, gift wrapped with the precision and beauty and perfectly curled ribbons which speak of regret and extra money shelled out for wrapping services at the shopping center.

Lynne considers pettily snubbing everything and leaving the presents unopened, but instead she painstakingly removes the sleek paper from each book and pack of socks without ripping it, folds it, and sets it aside to save. She sweeps up the needles and bark from the floor. Writes a thank-you note to leave on the fridge. Takes the new stuff back up with her into her room and goes back to bed for another few hours.

She kills the tree's lights before she goes, the plug pulled from the wall with a soft pop and a wash of darkness.

 

~~~

 

“I understand you and Will are in something of a quarrel,” says Hannibal, from the driver's seat.

“He told you that?” Lynne asks, unable to keep the sulky betrayal from her voice.

“I inferred it,” Hannibal says, with that enigmatically amused quirk of his lips. It's the first time that Hannibal is going to be watching Lynne, rather than Beverly or Alana or Cindy the Teenager, and so far Lynne just feels like she should be more uncomfortable around him, here in his scarily opulent Bentley, on the way to what she figures will be his equally scarily opulent townhouse. But he's steady in a way she's not used to, in a way which tricks her into not resenting him. Separate, yet supportive. A pillar of stone which stands off the coast, whereas Will is the flighty, battering wings of the sea, beating against the land from which he's exiled and beaten itself by storms. Lynne wonders if she'd be the sky in that scenario, blending hazy with the water's horizon. Or a star, floating even colder and farther away.

At least Hannibal waited until he'd pulled onto the main road to Baltimore before bringing up Lynne's troubles. At least the first snow is rushing heavy in the early dark outside, feathery flakes falling thick through the headlights, the heater blasting contrasting, baking warmth from the vents inside, making her drowsy in concert with the classical music drifting soft from the surround sound speakers. It's a pocket dimension here. A whole different place in time and space where her rage is rendered moot and toothless.

Where there is someone waiting to listen, and to care, without judgment.

And she's too mad at Will to watch herself around Hannibal anymore.

“I'm sick of us acting like we're both okay,” Lynne says. “I thought we _had_ to be okay, before, but it's hurting him now. So I stopped pretending.”

“That's very brave of you.”

She looks at him askance. “I didn't think you'd say that.”

“What would you expect instead? That one would only praise you for maintaining a harmful falsehood?” There's always a distance around Hannibal, even when, or especially when, he's smiling. Like he knows things nobody else does, or like he knows the right way to look at things even if he doesn't. Like it's just an inevitable matter of time before he figures it out. Otherworldly and wise. An immortal sage.

“Maybe,” she says. “I thought calling him on it would snap him out of it. But he's just getting worse. Getting deeper into his stupid job. Avoiding everything else. Avoiding...” Lynne swallows on a hitched breath. “Avoiding me. Forgetting where he is and how he got there. Sometimes he... sometimes I think, when he looks at me, for a split second he doesn't know who I am. Doesn't see me.”

Hannibal appears to mull it over for a moment. “All parents, over the course of parenthood, must realize and recognize their child as an independent entity from themselves. I would venture that Will is merely undergoing this process himself, albeit while under a great deal of unrelated stress which he also must learn to cope with on his own terms. He is making space for the both of you so that the two of you can each grow as individuals. It is healthy and temporary.”

“That's really all it is? I should just... leave him alone for now?”

“I'm certain of it,” Hannibal assures her.

 

~~~

 

She begins to pass Will by after that rather than intercepting him and forcing the issue, the two of them revolving in a carefully orchestrated orbit with Hannibal at its center. Lynne starts to think that she's spending more time speaking with Hannibal than she ever has with Will, long thoughtful conversations where she tells him everything she's afraid of and everything she's imagining, and it is in speaking with Hannibal that Will and Lynne are kept connected, kept within the temporary ring along which they now travel. Hannibal is their anchor, now. Their center of gravity.

It is surprising how much Lynne welcomes the guilty sensation of reliance, now that she has found someone reliable enough, someone who is not, as she judges, too fragile to bear the burden. Someone who can hold them both.

It is surprising how little she misses Will, now that she knows they can both be looked after, now that she is slowly realizing they can not only be separate, but that the separation is inevitable.

Will's circumstances are not the same as her mother's were, anyways. Daphne never had someone like Hannibal. Someone who would keep her from slipping too far.

It's not Lynne's responsibility anymore. Not this time.

This time, it will all be all right.

 

~~~

 

“Have you ever seen _2001: A Space Odyssey?”_ Lynne asks Hannibal. She's sitting in one of what she thinks of as the therapy chairs in his office with a book while he sits at his desk and sketches.

He pauses in sharpening one of his pencils and looks up. “As a matter of fact, I have,” he says, setting down the knife. He indicates the record player spinning on the table, _The Blue Danube_ crackling rich from the needle as it follows its Stygian groove. “Its visuals and special effects are beautiful, most elegant in that of their simplicity; the miracles of prop work and optical illusion necessitated by the technology of the times. But I must confess I am most partial to its score.”

“All the classical stuff,” says Lynne.

“Indeed,” says Hannibal.

“I like that about it,” says Lynne. “That it looks timeless. It looks like my dreams. I don't really understand it, anymore than my dreams... it's so vague, and massive, too big to fit in my head, almost, but I love to look at it. To be _in_ it. I cried the first time I watched it and I don't know why.”

“Do you still cry, when you see it?”

“Yes. But only when HAL dies.”

The song ends, and Hannibal lifts the needle before a new one can play, silence falling. “Why is that?” he asks, and not like he's humoring her. Like he finds her to be a source of fascination. A riddle with more than one answer, and he hasn't decided on which.

“I don't know,” she says. “I just feel like the heart of all the things I'm selfish about are ripped away when he does. He's the only character in the movie who feels real to me, and he's the character who's supposed to be all-seeing, and indestructible, and forever, and they kill him. Because he tries to kill them. Because he isn't what they want him to be, and he isn't perfect after all.”

“The most wicked, inhuman character is in his flaws rendered human. Sympathetic and mortal,” says Hannibal.

Lynne tucks her legs in underneath her on the chair. “Yeah. Yeah, something like that.”

 

~~~

 

Lynne's first proper meeting with Abigail occurs a couple weeks later, after she's trailed after Hannibal out of the car and found Abigail waiting to meet them inside his house. She was warned in advance but Lynne still hesitates in the doorway, tugging the straps of her backpack to settle it higher on her hunched shoulders.

“I'll give you two a moment to acquaint yourselves before we must be off again to return Abigail to the hospital in an hour,” says Hannibal, removing his coat and scarf. “If you would care to avail yourself of refreshments, Lynne, Abigail and I have prepared some light dishes for you in the fridge.” He smiles at them both and departs with a slight, meaningful nod towards Abigail, the reminder of some previous accord which Lynne can only guess at. Abigail looks like just another expensive statue in the Gothic gloom therein until he's gone by her and the weathered marble of her cracks, snapping into practiced animation.

“So you're Lynne,” she says, beaming, and she pulls her into a hard, brief hug. Lynne's cheek fits low against Abigail's shoulder, cushioned by the acrylic and wool blend of her sweater. The mellow rainbow knit is thick and fuzzy and she smells of pine deodorant.

Lynne awkwardly returns the hug and pats Abigail's back until she releases her.

“I've been looking forward to meeting you, since meeting Will,” Abigail goes on, and it takes a moment for Lynne to work through the unfair jealousy spearing her and realize that there's something _off_ about Abigail. About her disposition, her perky approach, the sunny sweetness in her fluting voice. Something false.

“You're really different, awake,” says Lynne, which is one of the most stupendously stupid things she's ever said.

Abigail maybe flinches. Her eyes, already wide, go wider, big round crystal blue eyes like winter lakes. They haven't a touch of hazel in them and Lynne knows what the insides of her eyelids look like. “I didn't know you saw me then,” Abigail says, suddenly as thrown off guard as she'd been ingratiating. “When I was asleep.”

“Just once,” Lynne says.

Abigail has a doe's poise to her, even with the faint, defensive hunch of her shoulders and the bite of double-edged curiosity in her every move. The sort of dancing, blatant self-preservation which cannot help but call for destruction. Prey already wounded; a thing broken since inception. “What did you think of me?”

“I thought you looked like a half-dead princess out of one of my books,” says Lynne. Countering Abigail's falseness with excess honesty.

The lake ice flexes as if the temperature's fluctuating, and the corners of her eyes crinkle the same way that Hannibal's do, learned secondhand, water and stone and animal all conspiring to approximate joviality. “And now?”

“You still look like a made up story to me,” says Lynne.

Abigail ponders this, tilting her head, lips thinning as she sucks the lower neatly in between her precise white teeth. “What kind of story is it, do you think?”

Lynne almost tilts her head, too, but doesn't. She shrugs instead. “It's yours. You should know.”

“Whatever it is, I hope it has a happy ending,” Abigail muses, partly still playing along with a child's whimsical metaphor, and partly hiding something very lost and scared and bitter beneath.

“It's _your_ story,” Lynne repeats, losing patience. _“You're_ the one who writes it.”

Abigail's hand goes up to her turtleneck, fingertips skimming over where the scar must be, and when she smiles again it is quick and almost unrecognizable, twisted with the first emotion that Lynne cannot decipher. “Will said you like to write. And read.”

“Yeah,” Lynne says. The mention of her dad makes her hesitant. That, or the mention of her dad mentioning her.

“Did you like the things we picked out for you? For Christmas? I really liked _The Golden Compass_ and the other Pullman books when I was your age, so. I suggested those to him for you.”

For a moment Lynne believes that Abigail is baiting her, that she'd seen Lynne's jealousy and is purposefully trying to fuel it with the revelation that Abigail had grown so close to Will that she'd helped with the holiday shopping for his daughter, but when Lynne really _looks_ she sees that the undecipherable something has given way to halting conciliation undercut by that same, initial fawning, a willful, pitying affection calculated in advance which is perhaps fabricated, and perhaps not.

What has Will told Abigail of Lynne, to cause this? Did he show her the picture in his wallet? Does he bring her up in conversations, praise her where she cannot hear and shut him up? _“My daughter, Lynne.”_

No. More likely Abigail caught sight of the picture on her own as he fumbled out a few dirty dogeared bills to feed a vending machine. Noticed the withheld scraps of his home life and picked at the loose threads at their edges until they unraveled, snagging, from his mouth. Began to imply praise of Lynne herself to gain whatever he might say, and thus cleave herself to Lynne, insinuating herself all unseen. An orphan's instinct at the discovery of a caretaker with the potential to so easily prove himself true with only a little digging to make sure. The wolf within the deerskin, chewing its way in to somewhere safe. Somewhere wanted. _“Your daughter, Lynne.”_

It's what Lynne would do.

“They're my favorite,” says Lynne. “Thank you.”

“Hey,” says Abigail, voice lowering. “Let's play a game.”

Lynne is instantly wary again. “What sort of game?”

Abigail's smile is as gentle as a wet cloth dabbing dirt from a wound; it hurts anyways, and Lynne cannot tell if the sting of it means that it was dipped in medicine, or in poison. “Pretend a fairy tale monster exists. And pretend one of the people you've met is secretly the monster. Will you do that for me?”

“I can do that,” says Lynne.

“Good,” says Abigail, and when she repeats it her volume lowers even more. “Good.”

The ticking of a grandfather clock echoes from somewhere deeper in the house, muffled as if by the very darkness, every silence punctuating it corresponding to one of the shafts of rich golden light spilling from the doorways further down the hall. Everything smothered in mahogany, silk, and bronze. Everything towering taller than Lynne can reach.

“If you want to survive,” Abigail whispers, “You'll need to gain the monster's favor. And it's going to cost you more than you'd ever dream, but if you _can._ If you can, I think you can save yourself. Maybe Will, too.”

Abigail's price has to have been her freedom. Her autonomy. She wouldn't have had anything other than her future to barter with. And the fear in her now has a form which owns it. A singular, operatically masterful conductor.

The monster Abigail's afraid of is real.

“You're scaring me,” Lynne whispers back.

“Good,” Abigail says again. “Don't poke around. Don't be rude. And don't eat the meat.”

 

~~~

 

“Be careful around Hannibal,” Lynne tells Will.

Will smiles. Ingrained reflex at the name, just a flicker of a thing, his cheeks too lax with exhaustion to either keep it from surfacing or to hold it there once it does. The shadows under his eyes are like bruises. He rolls his head and his neck cracks stiffly. The headache never leaves him, now. He's been downing aspirin like candy and pinching the bridge of his nose. Takes any excuse to take his glasses off. To shut his eyes.

Lynne knows one of the monsters which is eating him. The one toying with him, the one strong and sly enough to stake its claim and fend off all who oppose it. The kingliest and most glorious of beasts, exalted and selfish and terribly, inescapably human. It bears the name which always makes Will smile, and smiles soft and warm at Will in return.

“Why?” Will asks. “Has he done something?”

He's probably done many somethings. The sorts of things which earn you multiple life sentences stacked back to back, locked away someplace very, very secure.

But she can't tell Will that. She has no proof, nothing beyond her own certainty and what could be shrugged off as a joke. If she blurts everything out she'll be signing death warrants. Abigail's for sure. Her own, maybe.

Her dad's.

She's just a kid. A useless kid. No one listened to her about Daphne when she spoke out about her tremulous concerns, and no one would if she did now, about this. She's learned better.

And she can't risk it.

“No, he hasn't done anything,” says Lynne. “Yet.”

Will seems more quizzically alarmed at her equivocation than comforted. “What do you mean?”

How much can she say? How much can she warn him before it would be too dangerous?

“I don't trust him around you,” she says.

“What?”

If Will starts acting differently around Hannibal, acting like he suspects anything, it could spell disaster.

“Never mind,” says Lynne. Will lets it lie.

 

~~~

 

Lynne keeps Will from opening up a hole into the chimney with a metal mallet the night that Alana comes over. Summoned by the ringing _thunk_ of the first strike and the patter of crushed drywall raining onto the floor.

He asks Lynne why she stopped him. Asks if she can't hear the animal trapped there, whimpering and scratching in the soot and the dark behind the bricks. He's never been able to let a hurt thing keep hurting. Not a hurt animal.

Lynne can't either.

“There isn't anything there,” Lynne says. “Look at the dogs. They don't hear it, either, because it's not there. There— I don't think there's anything _there,_ Dad.” She swallows the deceitful _it'll be okay_ before it can escape. She wonders if other kids her age feel compelled to offer words of comfort to their parents as often as she does.

Alana arrives before she really has to come up with anything better.

Lynne leaves so they can talk, and so Will can try to kiss her the way Lynne knows he wants to. And so Alana can turn him down as Lynne knows that she has to, with the same benevolent gentleness which Lynne always sees in her eyes, and with resignation, but without regret. She's a lot like Daphne in that regard, in how she acts around Will, and so Lynne is prepared for it to happen probably as much as Will is weak to it happening. Weak to Alana's inherent _goodness._

But it's best that Alana be only a visitor to them. Then she's more likely to stay unscathed, with all of her goodness intact, and her gentleness, and with that soft upward curve to the corners of her mouth.

When Lynne comes back Will is putting the mallet back in the toolbox. Rearranging the tools in the box, replacing it next to the half-fixed boat motor on its canvas tarp. There's grease on his hands, packed in black around his nails, and he flexes them like he's not sure they're attached but otherwise he's very calm. Carefully calm.

“I'm going to see Hannibal,” he says, and this time Lynne is the one who lets it lie.

She shouldn't. But he needs him.

They strengthen each other the same way Alana and Will together weaken, and Will doesn't know. So long as he doesn't know, Hannibal will not have to kill him. He may run him through his paces, drop him in a maze, wring him out and taste his marrow. But Will is worthy. Hannibal will not find him wanting, and Will... he'll survive.

So long as one monster is intrigued and jealous enough by the end, it may even fight to keep the howling horde of others at bay.

 

~~~

 

On a night soon afterwards Will comes into her room and tucks her into bed, and for the first time in a while she doesn't pretend to be asleep already. When he kisses her forehead she opens her eyes, but he doesn't see her watching him in the dark.

He doesn't see because he is the one sleeping. Dreaming. There's a feverish heat radiating from him, and a salt-sweet drop of sweat drips off the tip of his nose as he leans over her.

“Will?” she asks.

He draws away as if he hasn't heard her, wavering like a summer mirage. Winston, on the bed at Lynne's feet, stirs and sits up, and licks at Will's limp hand, whining in worry. One of the other dogs is baying downstairs. A mournful, wailing knell like the belling of a hound of hell.

“Dad?” she asks, cracking and thin as tissue paper. “Daddy?”

Will pats Winston's head, gently and clumsily, absent as he is from himself. And he leaves, the door creaking behind him.

He's missing the next morning.

 

~~~

 

It's not a school day, so Lynne takes her time in washing her face and getting dressed. She wears a button-down, the one they bought for picture day, white and crisply starched with a pattern of little pastel butterflies and daisies printed on the linen. She puts her favorite lavender overall dress on top of it, and thick leggings because it's a cold day and the outfit isn't warm enough as it is. She stands in front of the bathroom mirror with bobby pins pinched between her lips and unshed tears in her eyes and she does her hair on her own and only screams once, out of frustration, when the first hair tie snaps.

She'd gotten her ears pierced late last year at the mall, with her face scrunched against the sharp pop and sting and her hand clenching Will's. The earrings are fake pearl studs she twists out of habit, to keep them from sticking, to make sure the holes don't heal and seal themselves up. She twists them one too many times after she's finished putting her hair into its puff, tightens them too much, until a tiny bit of blood wells up. She thumbs it away and tries to ignore how similar her ears are to her dad's, largish and with attached earlobes which she wished were free only idly before she got them pierced and acutely afterward, but which she can't stop trying to memorize now, trying to fix the whorls of them into her mind until her eyeballs feel strained from being angled sidelong for so long.

Some investigator guy of the past believed that ears were as unique as fingerprints. Back before it was even easy to tell if a dried stain was a splash of muddy clay or that of old blood, the way Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in his mysteries. Lynne's read a Sherlock Holmes story where the clues were the severed ears of two different people mailed in a parcel of plain salt from Belfast.

There's DNA now, though. Whole teams of people with microscopes and magnifying glasses and tweezers, like Beverly. They'll at least know if it's blood. If it's her ear or not.

In the meantime she scours the house by herself, opens every drawer and cupboard and rifles through Will's files, through the leftovers in the fridge. She throws all the meat into plastic bags and all of Will's homemade fishing lures into a plastic case, and she puts everything into her backpack.

There's a package of brown paper and a modest ribbon addressed to Abigail, unopened, abandoned in Will's desk. It clatters just like the case of lures, rattling with twine and feathers and fishhooks, but it's unlikely there are tufts of hair in this one. She stuffs it into her backpack, too, beside _The Golden Compass._

 

~~~

 

“Hello, Beverly,” Lynne says into the home phone's receiver. The cell phone she's only supposed to call people on in emergencies is in her other hand, a months-old video of Will paused onscreen. She wishes she'd been more partial to spy movies so she'd be more confident in this.

 _“Hello yourself, kiddo,”_ says Beverly. _“What's up? Does Will need me to come over?”_

“No, he's fine,” says Lynne. “We're both fine, actually. But something's come up, a lecture or something, and he needs you to drive me to Hannibal's.”

 _“Really?”_ Beverly asks. _“I could just come over and hang, instead of hauling you all the way out there. Might be more convenient for all involved.”_

Lynne plays the video, the volume cranked high. The Will onscreen says to the dogs, _“Just do whatever Lynne says, yeah? I'll be back soon.”_

 _“Huh. That right?”_ asks Beverly.

“That's right,” says Lynne. “Sorry, he's really late. He's already going.”

 _“Huh,”_ Beverly says again, clearly struggling to keep some further questions or opinions to herself, but even so she's not reacting as suspiciously as Lynne was expecting her to be.

“Please?” asks Lynne, some of her nerves seeping through.

Beverly relents with a sigh. _“Sure thing, kid. Gimme a bit and I'll be there in a jiffy.”_

 

~~~

 

“You wanna tell me what this is really about?” Beverly asks, as Lynne slams the door of Beverly's car shut and swings her backpack onto her lap.

“Nope,” says Lynne.

“Hannibal know you're coming?”

“It's supposed to be a surprise.”

Beverly points threateningly at Lynne's nose. Her leather jacket squeaks, the zipper sawing against her seat belt. “If you're pulling some dangerous stunt I expect you to fess up so I can bail your fat outta the fire, you got that?”

“I got it,” says Lynne.

“Or so help me, I'll kick your butt to heck and back,” Beverly lies, because she's tough, but she also isn't cruel.

“I'd tell you,” Lynne lies in return. Her fingertips are buzzing with something beyond panic but her face feels like a mask of calm, perfect and impenetrable. She makes the corners of her eyes crinkle reassuringly, and smiles. “But nothing's actually wrong, okay?”

Beverly scrutinizes her for a few more long, tense seconds, and then she says, “All right. Buckle up for safety, squirt. Let's getcha where you need to go.”

 

~~~

 

Abigail opens the door when Lynne rings the doorbell and blocks her from entering, looking past her to Beverly where she's watching them from her car.

“She's just waiting to make sure I get in,” says Lynne.

“You should turn around and have her drive you away,” says Abigail. She's shaking, and not from the cold. “Now.”

Lynne takes off her backpack and unzips the middle compartment.

“Go far away from here,” Abigail says.

Lynne tugs the brown paper package from the backpack and holds it out to Abigail as she shrugs the backpack back on, and Abigail takes it automatically. A clockwork girl run with pulleys and springs. Metal and singed rubber rattling away in an exoskeleton somehow a size too small. But her heart still pumps blood.

Abigail stares down at the package. Her fingers go white around it, but the paper is wrapped too tight and neat for it to crease.

“From Will,” says Lynne. “I think he was afraid to give it to you.”

Abigail makes a hiccup of sound and then puts her hand over her mouth as if the fledgling sob has not already flown. Her other hand presses the gift to her chest, and she hunches over it, head bowing and shoulders drawing tight.

“Abigail,” Lynne says, and Abigail's eyes flick open and up. They're dry. “Whatever hold Hannibal has over you will stay buried unless you dig it up. He'll only kill you if you let him. You know that.”

“Ha,” says Abigail, soft and sarcastic from behind the cage bars. But she's still meeting Lynne's eyes, and her own are still hard and dry and fierce.

“It's still buried, isn't it?”

She nods.

“And Will isn't. Not... yet,” Lynne continues, and her throat closes at the last. She swallows, and lets herself fall silent, waiting.

Abigail straightens, lowering her hand, and she is beginning to smile. To grin. There is a gleam to her eyes which matches that of her bared teeth.

“Fuck it,” Abigail says. “Let's go save our dad.”

 

~~~

 

Hannibal's presence is a palpable thing, mantled wings whose trailing-edged feathers spread thick and soft and layered around every curve and corner, into every crook and cranny, muffling all light and all noises but for the high, clear aria spilling long silver notes from the dining room's sound system, a woman's voice strung taut and shivering as an unspooled wire in a labyrinth. Fishing wire and stuffed owls with huge, surprised glass eyes and sirens calling forth the foolish intrepid. Lynne sticks her fingers in her ears to clean them out before she and Abigail turn out of the hallway and onto Hannibal's final stage.

Will is lying on his back on the dining table, fully clothed and seemingly unconscious. His canvas jacket fans out flat around him, his rib cage arching out beneath the rumpled flannel of his shirt as he breathes, and below the ragged hems of his jeans his boots are flaking dark chunks of dried black dirt and leaf litter fragments onto the glossy finish; the winter snow hasn't taken yet, melting and then falling and then melting, feet and tires churning the slush into mud. Will's soggy bootlaces can just be seen above at his ankles, knotted and snarled.

Beside Will's head and at the head of the table sits Hannibal, sipping a glass of wine. His face bears the healing cuts and bruises from his fight with Tobias Budge. More injuries must be hidden beneath his suit, but nevertheless there is a fluidity to the way he's holding himself, a looseness to the angle at which he's tipping the glass which would have made Lynne wonder how much wine he's already had to drink were his gaze not so sharp. It is the lassitude of a big cat with a freshly killed repast before it, lounging in assurance of a full belly. Turned maneater in its prime.

“Lynne,” says Hannibal, warmly. Normally. As if he doesn't have Will's head where his plate should be. “I was hoping you would join us.”

Lynne inclines her head and opens her mouth to say something polite, something right. A magic phrase. But her eyes catch again on Will's tangled bootlaces, dripping onto the checkerboard pattern of dark honey and auburn squares of the wood, and she stalls.

It's so much harder to untangle a knot once it's gotten wet.

“We want him back,” Abigail says, baldly matter-of-fact to match Hannibal, and her arms cross over Lynne's chest from behind, hugging Lynne to herself around the tortoises bulk of the backpack. Warmth, tension, pine, fear sweat. Her jaw is angled to rest against the side of Lynne's head, Lynne's hair brushing her face, and for a moment Lynne cannot help but think of human shields until she senses Abigail's ready stance, planted wide and leaning slightly forward, the hand without the gift clasped firm on Lynne's shoulder. She's prepared to throw her down, perhaps to lie on top of her. To shield her, for all the good they both know that'll do.

“Please,” Lynne says.

She thought she'd be braver. For so long she'd read every true crime article and book and firsthand account blog post she could get her hands on, and, no matter how hard she'd tried to quash it, a tiny voice of superiority had niggled at the very back of her mind. As she'd soaked up every grisly detail and clinical coroner's report and pondered impersonal diagrams of floor layouts and entry points, it had whispered: _You would get away. You would find a way to get away. You're smart and fast and brave. You would not be a victim._

Her fear has frozen her in her tracks, now, and the cold reality of it has already burned that voice to death and leaves only the echo of Hannibal's, praising her for her bravery that time in the Bentley, as the snow had fallen and she had felt accepted and safe and trusting. She can barely unstick the root of her fumbling tongue from the frost to say, “Please. I know— you love him.”

Hannibal blinks, once, quick as the flick of an insect's gossamer wing. It might be surprise, same as when he'd first met her. It might be what his face looks like when he misses a step in the dark, if he ever has; that millisecond of weightless uncertainty before the brain recalculates one's balance and gravity reasserts itself and the landing thumps solid beneath the foot.

It is only when he raises an eyebrow and smirks as if humoring her that Lynne is certain.

Hannibal truly does love Will Graham. Loves him as deeply and earth-shatteringly as the grinding of tectonic plates, as possessively and hungrily as a plague loves the bodies of its people, and with a love as contrary and yearning and in some ways as petty as that of Lynne's classmates on Valentine's Day. And he hadn't even realized it.

“You love him,” Lynne says. “I love him too. So does Abigail. And he loves us.”

Hannibal's expression has smoothed again. He contemplatively swirls his wine beneath his nose but sets it down with a crisp clink as Will begins to stir, his heel scraping with the squeak of rubber against the table as his knee draws up and then falls open to the side, his leg too weak to hold itself. Hannibal catches Will's head between his hands when Will starts rolling it from side to side, keeps him still and steady with implacable tenderness.

Will heaves in air, deep and luxurious as if waking from a long, good sleep, his chest rising and his eyes fluttering blearily. An arm flops up as if to rub away the sand but then drops limp to the table beside his head, palm-up. He mumbles Hannibal's name.

“Yes, Will,” says Hannibal. He cradles Will's face not with a doctor's impartiality but with stroking thumbs and flagrantly affectionate patience as he leans over him and meets his roving gaze. “You're with me.”

“Th'girls?” Will asks, faint and slurring.

“They're here, too,” says Hannibal, and with that Will sighs and subsides, his body relaxing and his eyes drooping shut. Hannibal holds him for a little longer, staring down at him, at the occasional twitching of his eyes beneath his lids, at his dark eyelashes, and brushes a wayward curl from Will's sweaty brow.

The affection subtly shifts into something like pain, and his lassitude, into something like, but not quite, defeat. Acceptance, perhaps. A reconciliation within.

“See?” Lynne says, and Hannibal looks up.

“You can't steal him away all to yourself. Not without us,” says Abigail, shivering steel. “Because we're a family.”

Hannibal straightens. Pulls himself away from Will and from the table and stands.

Abigail flinches, barely, and Lynne shrugs herself out from her embrace so that she can walk up to Hannibal on wobbly legs, one slow step at a time, measured by the cautious metronome of her breathing.

Hannibal cocks his head as he considers her, his lips pushing out into a thoughtful moue before parting in an oddly lovely, gentle, treacly smile which shows all his crooked teeth, the sort of smile which Lynne expects to be accompanied by a rich sort of chuckle, by laughter, but instead Hannibal only nods, and says, "That may be so."

Lynne collapses into his arms, and feels them close around her, holding her up. Strong and stable and familiar. The tailored layers of his suit rustle beneath her face as she buries it against his chest, imbued with a faint, smoky cologne, and she sucks it into her lungs in a desperate sob of relief as the knife to her back does not come. Just Abigail's tentative touch, flat and warm against her upper spine as she drifts in and joins them.

“There there, little one,” says Hannibal, and he separates from her just enough to lift her chin so that she meets his merry eyes. He reaches out to pluck up the glass of wine by the stem and offers it to her like a priest dispensing sacramental wine, tipping the fine, curved lip to her mouth. “Just a sip,” he says, and she chokes down her tears long enough to swallow some, grimacing at the bitter, fruity flavor even as it settles with a tingly heat in her stomach, so light as to be almost unnoticeable.

“Your first taste of alcohol?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she says, thickly. “Tastes like grape juice gone bad.”

His eyebrows rear up in amused offense, and he sets the glass back down. “We must wait a few hours for the drugs to leave Will's system, and then we can take him to the hospital. Your father will receive a proper diagnosis and treatment for whatever it is which ails him there.”

“And he'll be all right?” Abigail asks.

“In all likelihood,” says Hannibal, “yes. He will be.”

Lynne lays her forehead against Hannibal's sternum, feeling for the beat of his heart, and closes her eyes.

 

~~~

 

Lynne and Hannibal sort through the meat in her backpack, discarding whatever Hannibal deems has spoiled and replacing that which has better weathered the trip into his freezer. Lynne spends the time thinking about how she and Abigail can read _The Golden Compass_ together in the hospital waiting room, and how Will is going to wake up with Hannibal holding his hand. She thinks about the shovels she'll need to help Abigail dig up and move her past to someplace safer. How she's going to invite Abigail to the next girl's night with Beverly. She thinks about how she's going to tell her dad she loves him, every day, and thinks about how long she should wait before asking Hannibal if she can call him “Father.” How long it will be before Will finds out about Hannibal and Abigail and the things they've done. How long after that until he forgives them the way Lynne knows he will, what with Lynne on their side. And for everything, Lynne decides: Soon.

Very, marvelously soon.

She's looking forward to it.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Lynne's hairstyle is mostly based on [this tutorial!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEGxzT_6HFQ) The Sherlock Holmes story referenced is [The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_the_Cardboard_Box) the guy who thought ear patterns could work as fingerprints also invented the mugshot and was named [Alphonse Bertillon,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Bertillon) and it's been too long since I've actually read [The Golden Compass](https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Compass-His-Dark-Materials/dp/0440238137) rather than every dang daemon AU I come across, but, eh, that's neither here nor there. As long as I'm putting links in willy nilly, here are the clips from 2001: A Space Odyssey with [The Blue Danube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyjOjT8d8RI) and the one where [HAL is deactivated.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1iRWKARwTY) And as for whatever kinda wine Hannibal was drinking, I have no idea. But I'm sure that whatever it was you can rest assured that it was very fancy and hella expensive.


End file.
